


Punishment II

by Annevar44



Category: Les Miserables
Genre: Angst, Caning, D/s, Handcuffs, M/M, Madeleine is not a saint, Shame, Stripping, UST, fluff almost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-29 20:55:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/691343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annevar44/pseuds/Annevar44
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Javert wants to be dismissed.  Madeleine wants to be forgiving. But even he has a dark side, and nineteen years at Toulon are hard to forget entirely.</p><p> </p><p> <i>The mayor tapped meaningfully on his desk. Javert's belly clutched, tight and loose at once, as he took his place and bent over, bracing his chained hands against the dark oiled surface. He could feel the cold air prick him through his underclothes. It was humiliating to be exposed - he felt unmoored, and his breath came too fast. From the corner of his eye, he watched the mayor stroke the heavy stick and touch its knob, and heft it back and forth from hand to hand.</i></p><p> </p><p>Companion story to:<br/>Punishment, by aunt_zelda<br/>which, words fail me -- so hot, so brilliant! -- read it first here:</p><p>http://aunt-zelda.livejournal.com/311822.html</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Javert tied his hair back neatly and took care to straighten the seams of his greatcoat. He reminded himself fiercely that exhaustion did not excuse carelessness. On this day of all days, he must not disgrace his position by appearing before the mayor in disarray. 

Through the long night, he had paced relentlessly, wearing down the stones before his fireplace. His thoughts had moved to and fro along the arc of a pendulum, but always they arrived back at their starting point. He could not see any road before him except one. Finally the gray light of dawn had arrived, leaving him no choice but to swallow his dread. Morning had come. He would face his duty.

The mayor did not raise his head when Javert entered his office, though he signified awareness of the intrusion by coldly turning away. This was as it should be. Respectfully Javert saluted the mayor’s back and stood waiting. His spine was rigid and he held his hat in his hand. 

Finally the magistrate saw fit to look up. “All right, Javert. What is it?” 

“Monsieur le maire. Forgive me for disturbing you, but I am come on a matter of some urgency.”

It was said. The blade of the guillotine was set in motion. 

He took a breath, and began his report. 

He spoke first of Toulon, and the brute Valjean who had slipped free of the state’s surveillance. He next confessed his error - the awful letter to the Prefecture. His voice shook but he omitted nothing. He had indulged in an inferior man’s humiliated pride and set out on a paltry quest for vengeance. This had led him to defy authority, the thing he held most sacred. He had disgraced his position. He wanted no indulgence, only justice. 

He fell silent, keeping his head bowed in the attitude of a penitent awaiting judgment.

He had already determined his course. The farms of the north country had frequent need of migrant labor. He had money laid up from his twenty-five years of service and austere living, but this he would set aside as long as he could. Winters would be difficult. He was no longer entirely a young man and had no experience with farming, but supposed he would learn, as he had no other skill beyond the work he was no longer fit for. He would slave on the land until sickness or starvation released him into death. 

_T. F. P.,_ he thought with a flicker of bitter amusement. _Travaux forces a perpetuite._

He felt inexplicably drawn to this future of abasement and degradation. It would be in some way a relief to fall as low as a man could fall. He could not think why he should feel this way and it troubled him greatly. Tooth and nail he had fought, throughout his life, to keep himself above the sucking sewer-muck of his origins and to remain ever rigid, upright, and vigilant: a sentry at his post. 

The mayor had drawn a sharp breath when he began to speak of Toulon. At some points during Javert's tale he appeared to start with amazement or dismay. Indeed, by the end he appeared dazed and gray with shock. 

Javert concluded simply: “So you can see, Monsieur le maire, what must be done.”

“What… must be done?” 

“I must be punished, Monsieur. Dismissed. For the good of the service.” He flinched as he said it, and cursed his weakness.

The mayor turned away and gazed out the window toward the threatening sky without. For a few long moments he appeared lost in some distant memory. His jaw twitched and he clenched his hands. Then he drew himself up. 

In a swift instant his countenance transformed savagely. His civil expression became a feral grin; his features coarsened, and his eyes glinted brazenly. Javert knew a moment of shock at his superior's change. He had seen men who looked like this before, but it had been a long time; in fact, he had not seen such men since--

Rising like a tiger, the mayor seized his wrist violently. He spoke in a low voice taut with suppressed fury. “Punishment! Is that what you wish of me, Javert? Have you any idea the meaning of that word? Do you wish to know truly what it is like to be--" He broke off. A look of bleak despair came over him. It was a look no one in Montreuil had ever before seen in the face of M. Madeleine. 

Javert stood transfixed. The sudden threat and power of the mayor's presence put a spell on him. He was entranced by the body so near his own, the heat of it, the vise-lock around his wrist, the suggestion of-- of what? An unspoken danger; one he could not name or turn away from. An unaccustomed feeling was rising in his chest. Against his will, he felt himself drawn to this strange, changed version of M. Madeleine. A deep flush rose from under the collar of his greatcoat.

“I will not seek official redress,” the mayor said more calmly, though a glint of menace still flashed in his eyes. He released Javert’s wrist. “We will settle this matter here -- privately, the two of us. I can give you the... discipline... you deserve. If you wish it. Do you?” 

There was mockery in the words, and a challenge thrown down; an invitation that was almost a command.

_Do you?_


	2. Chapter 2

Javert had sometimes seen, while prowling in the night or on the rim of daybreak, a rabbit or mouse crouching on the weedy edge of town, motionless and trembling, while the shadow of an owl passed over. He had never understood their behavior until now. He felt himself fall into a sort of paralyzed thrall - yet he knew he was still a man; he still had enough strength to make a choice. He could bow, offer up his excuses, and retreat hurriedly from the mayor's presence. He could wrench himself to safety before it was too late.

_Do you?_

Clenching his hands tightly behind his back, he heard himself whisper, "Yes."

The mayor stepped soundlessly to circle behind him. His words were soft at Javert's ear. “The uniform you disgraced: take it off. You are no longer fit to wear it.”

Javert stiffened. After a beat he looked at his hat. It was still in his hands; he had been holding it all this while. Now he set it on a chair. 

"Continue." 

His hands went to the buttons of his coat. His fingers fumbled stupidly at their task. With cool detachment the mayor surveilled his efforts, and under his gaze Javert’s hands began to tremble. 

When the coat was laid aside he bent and removed his boots. Then he paused, uncertain. Sweat dampened his underarms. A pit, he felt, was opening in the floor and a rank smell rose from it, corrupt and wild like the odor of a brothel. M. Madeleine watched in silence. Keeping his eyes forward, Javert slowly reached for the laces his trousers. He removed first the right leg and then the left. He laid the trousers beside the empty coat and hat. 

The damp linen shirt clung to his skin and his light under-trousers followed the planes and curves of his hips. “Must I…?” Javert asked hoarsely, reaching for the collar of his shirt. 

The mayor was seized suddenly by a fit of coughing. “No,” he said. “No, that will be sufficient.” The eyes that moved over Javert’s body glittered now. There was hunger in them. It struck Javert that the mayor might be a species of madman. He stood rigid, enduring the indignity of exposure and inspection. A wild impulse seized him: to fall to the ground; to clasp the other man’s knees. 

“Tell me what you want of me, Javert. Say it.”

_Strike me. Kick me. Let me put myself at your feet._

He could not say such words aloud, of course. But could he deny them? Only a coward or a man without honor hid behind falsehoods and evasions. Here he stood on his final day as a servant of the law: before a man whom he had wronged, a superior who had ordered him to answer, a magistrate administering his just punishment. 

Like a soldier before his officer, he gazed steadily ahead as he forced the words past his lips: “I want you… to … to beat me.” 

Mortification crashed over him as these contemptible words resounded in his own ears. In the silence that followed he held his breath, and his chest barely restrained the wild hammer of his heart. 

“You carry manacles in a pocket of your greatcoat, do you not?” 

Javert had put manacles on many worthless men. He had always liked the heft of their weight in his pocket. It had given him satisfaction to snap them in place around the wrists of a captured man, marking him publicly as a creature of the lowest order. As he presented his wrists to M. Madeleine he strove to keep his countenance impassive. The irons, he noticed, fit him beautifully; they might have been forged at the moment of his birth with foreknowledge of his future fall. He was at last where he belonged. He closed his eyes briefly. It came to him that he was helpless now. He had handed himself into the custody of the mayor, a man who was perhaps not wholly in his right mind. Like a rider in a runaway carriage, his fate had passed out of his hands. A curious lightness accompanied this thought.

“And so you will be beaten,” hissed the mayor. “Like a dog. Like a child.”

_Like a child._

He never thought of childhood. He had indeed been beaten in those days, his mother's curses ringing in his ears. She was the one who had taught him what it meant to be small and helpless. It was she who had made him sit up straight and study his letters in a corner of the frigid cell, drilling him on schoolwork while the other prisoners' sons were allowed to run wild as jackals. "You will better yourself! You must!" But at night the blows and oaths were forgotten and tenderness crept in to cover him as they lay down together on the dirty straw pallet, on the dirty floor, and she held him. Her broad, copper-skinned face was marred by pox scars but her hair was radiant. Its dark tousled ringlets spread loose around them as she pulled him close and sang to him in a foreign tongue and kept him warm.

The mayor was fingering the head of his walking stick, turning it in his hands. Javert had delivered many blows with just such a stick; he knew precisely the sound it would make striking flesh. 

“How many blows, would you say, do you deserve?” 

Thirty, of course; that was the proper number. The convicts had always gotten thirty, at Toulon.

The mayor tapped meaningfully on his desk. Javert's belly clutched, tight and loose at once, as he took his place and bent over, bracing his chained hands against the dark oiled surface. He could feel the cold air prick him through his underclothes. It was humiliating to be exposed - he felt unmoored, and his breath came too fast. From the corner of his eye, he watched the mayor stroke the heavy stick and touch its knob, and heft it back and forth from hand to hand.

The scalloped edge of the wooden desk felt cold through the thin cloth. It pressed in a firm line across Javert's hips, against his near-naked skin. The unaccustomed sensation was -- and he realized this with horror – affecting his body in a way he could not control. He twisted his torso, endeavoring to conceal himself. Before, he had dreaded the stick; now he prayed fervently that M. Madeleine would strike him quickly and extinguish his sin before it was found out. 

“Thirty strokes then. Count them out -- or I will double it.” 

Javert drew a sharp breath and nodded stiffly.

The first blow fell immediately; he was not ready and bit the inside of his cheek, tasting blood and only just keeping himself from crying out. Pain flamed across the backs of his thighs. “O-One!” he gasped.

With the second blow he was prepared and kept his voice steady. To remain in control; to bear the blows unflinchingly, to accept his punishment without rancor, and to utter no sound besides the count he was bidden to keep -- these were the tasks he set himself.

“Eight.” Sweat was rolling down his brow, splashing onto the desk. As the pain increased so did the tension of his body. There was agony in the anticipation of each blow, in not knowing where he would next be torn. The mayor was delivering strikes across his upper legs, his back, and the swell of his buttocks. Yet while his body suffered, the greater part of his mind had gone away into a kind of restfulness. Having surrendered himself he was now required only to submit; nothing more. His innumerable duties, which he performed always with the strictest of diligence, were lifted while he was in the mayor's custody. This rendered him as unburdened as Atlas at the moment he shifted the sky onto the shoulders of Hercules. 

“Fourteen.” His legs trembled, and he redoubled his efforts to hold still.

“S-Seventeen.” This time his face twisted in a grimace of agony; he could not help it. But he composed himself immediately.

He was cracking apart in a deep inside place that had no name. He felt a great need to open his throat and cry aloud, giving full voice to his agony. A maelstrom of emotion had shaken loose from its customary restraints and was rising the way a river rises in a storm. He was not accustomed to having any emotions at all; now he swelled with them. Desperation, loneliness, savagery, triumph, anguish -- and above all, the pride of his strength. He would bear the blows and make no sound. But - if only it were permissible - he yearned to raise his voice and howl. 

Instead he clenched his jaws tighter as the next blow fell. “Twenty,” he gasped, “auh…” A little involuntary moan escaped him. It was a relief, a release. It was a crack in the dam. But the dam would hold; he promised this. He would make no sound.

The mayor bent low, his lips at Javert’s ear. “Have you had all you can bear?” he murmured. “Will you beg me now to show you mercy?”

“No, monsieur,” Javert gasped. “Please. I must take it all." A dangerous burning was afflicting his eyes and he kept them tightly shut. _"Please,_ monsieur.” 

The answer came: two more blows, fierce and in quick succession. The first tore the flesh low on his back. The second landed in the same place, jolting his legs with shocks of racing flame. Under this onslaught he could not hold back a cry of agony. 

_Yes! This!_

In exultation his mind broke free and flew - back to the warm filth of their pallet where she and he had been together. But his thoughts could not rest there; they followed naturally to the next place: the prison sickroom, cold and clean, where she had been taken one morning. He had trailed behind sullenly, angry at her for going. He had passed hours and then days In the squalid visitor’s room, swinging his feet furiously and playing at nothing. The nursing sister would sometimes allow him to spend a few minutes at his mother's bedside. More often she would forbid him entry. It had been the third evening when the cure appeared with a solemn face while he was sitting on his usual bench, knocking his heels against it. 

“She has gone to God.” 

He had looked up at the man, uncomprehending. His body understood the words before his mind, and a violent trembling seized him. All at once his bones had become ice and his skin was frost and a dark hand closed on his throat. 

Harsh hands yanked him up from the cold stone floor to thrust him back on the bench. Two prison guards passed by. "Imagine,” he heard, “a fuss like that over a thirty-sou harlot; you’d think she was the Holy Mother!"

They were laughing and this brought him back to his senses. He twisted away, thrusting his face into his dirty sleeve to hide his tears. He dug his fists into his thighs. He must not make a fuss. He was a grown lad of seven now; Maman would expect him to do better. After some time he managed to quiet himself, and after that he made no further sound except for the occasional uncontrollable heave of his thin chest. He remained on the bench throughout the night, forgotten by all. In the morning a guard noticed him still sitting stiffly where he had been left, and led him away.

Wood struck again; again flesh yielded. “Twenty-three!” he choked. He did not cry out this time, for the pain was not sufficient to break him. Perhaps M. Madeleine was tiring. Or perhaps, he thought wryly, the mayor was holding himself back out of his usual misplaced mercy. Javert was ensnared by mounting frustration. Blows fell, and each one burned like a lit fuse across skin already lacerated, but none was quite strong enough to tear another cry from his throat.

“Thirty,” he moaned, and staggered against the desk. His vision swam and he fought to force himself upright.

And then, warm and kind, a hand - the hand of M. Madeleine - slid down his spine. Lightly it skimmed over his tortured flesh in a touch so gentle it was nearly obscene. It came to rest at the small of his back. 

Javert’s breath caught. He was a man of forty-four. In all his adult life, which he reckoned from the age of seven, he had never known a gentle touch from man or woman. Warmth and kindness and lust were all equally foreign to him. His physical naivete was so great that this simple caress, the sweet shock of it, set his body suddenly alight -- just as the driest wood bursts most quickly into flame.

More than anything in the world, it was his appalling yet desperate desire to turn and press his body close against the mayor of Montreuil. His thin trousers shifted, tenting out. Again he flushed in terror of discovery.

“Will that be all, Javert?” The voice was soft. 

Javert swallowed hard and nodded. 

“Then I will allow you a few moments. To compose yourself.”

The mayor placed the key of the manacles on the desk.

As the door whispered closed, the last of Javert’s strength fled. He collapsed forward across the desk and, wincing, laid his head on his crossed arms. A great pressure forced its way up from his chest into his throat, making it hard to breathe. His legs trembled and water sprang to his eyes; he let a soundless sob escape his lips. He was terrified to discover his eyes were wet. He pressed his hands to his face; his shoulders shook. 

Presently he calmed and again recalled the mayor, who must be waiting even now on the other side of the door. He raised himself and managed to dress. Pain seared him with every movement. It occurred to him that his mortification would continue for days or even weeks to come. 

An hour before, he had dressed carefully in his own quarters. Now he repeated the same actions. Once again he smoothed back his hair and adjusted the seams of his coat. He dreaded to think of meeting the mayor’s eyes on his way out. However, he was not one to shrink from duty. He would bow to M. Madeleine one last time. 

He arranged his thoughts. His quarters were spartan and would take only moments to set in order. He would leave an additional month’s rent on the bedside table with a note of apology to his landlady for departing without notice. Though his wounds would slow his pace considerably, he could reach the cheese-farms of the foothills in three days if he traveled by the north road and drove himself hard. By then he would be healed enough to offer himself for work. 

Outside the office, he found the mayor sitting with his head bent, his lips moving silently in prayer. Javert cleared his throat. “Good day, Monsieur le maire.” He made himself bow correctly. He winced only a little. 

The mayor looked up, and Javert saw that his face was drawn with misery.

“A good day to you, Inspector.” The mayor rose to his feet. After a moment's hesitation he added, “I will be coming to the station-house tomorrow morning to discuss some affairs of the public good. I trust I will see you at your post.”

Javert started. The mayor held his gaze. No mockery or malice shone in his eyes now. Instead he looked grief-stricken, and ashamed. 

The mayor continued, his words tumbling out in a rush. "Pierre Chesnelong has once again nearly run down a pedestrian with his wild driving - Mere Buseaupied, who lives in that last shack on the east road. I want you to go to her tomorrow and urge her to file a formal complaint. There is also a complaint from a man in the Rue Montre-de-Champigny about his neighbor's rain-gutter-- and a number of other matters, too-- But look, this is of no import now.” He wrung his hands. “We can discuss it tomorrow. When you are... rested." He flushed and looked down, and when he resumed speaking, his voice was quiet but his countenance held rigid tension that bespoke an unquiet mind. "You are an honest man, Inspector -- an honorable one. You don’t conceal your deeds or seek to evade justice. That's estimable. It makes you more honorable than-- than many men."

He drew a sharp breath and straightened his shoulders. Holding out his hand to Javert he said abruptly, "So: tomorrow then. You will be at your post?"

Javert looked at the offered hand in shock. How could the magistrate sully himself with the touch of someone so utterly disgraced? He stared at the clean nails, the broad palm that spoke eloquently of the mayor's simple virtues and commanding strength. He could not reach for that hand. He could not move. 

But a thought struck him. Something in the mayor's miserable face made him think of it. Suppose-- suppose he was forgiven, his crime expiated, his punishment complete. Was it possible? It was a matter of law that a guilty man who had served his sentence could be set free. Could even be returned to society. Could even regain his former position. What if the hard hand of the mayor was the instrument of not just his punishment, but also his redemption. Could it be that the mayor had broken the criminal, and restored the honest man? 

Reverently, he reached out to clasp the gift that was being offered him.

The magistrate's hand was rougher than his own, his grip unyielding and strangely desperate – as if the mayor himself had forgotten whether he were raising Javert up from shame or was himself clutching upward, hoping to be raised. As their hands held fast to each other, palm against palm and strength against strength, a swell of unchained hope rose in Javert's soul. He looked at the mayor in an unguarded way with a kind of naked need. He saw the other man's breath quicken, his lips part, as he gazed back.

An onlooker, seeing them standing so -- hand in hand, eye to eye -- might have described the portrait they made thus: A fallen man before his judge. A sinner clinging fast to his salvation. A remorseful wrongdoer seeking his victim's forgiveness. A chaste man hesitating before temptation. An imprisoned man begging to be set free. 

And yet, in each instance it would have been difficult to say which man was which.

"You will be at your post?" the mayor repeated in a low voice. 

Javert regarded the mayor with a clear-eyed gaze. He could see hope; he could see joy flickering on the horizon that he had never before raised his eyes to. He bowed then, feeling pain lance his tender flesh, and alongside the pain flowed a feeling he did not dare to put a name to. 

"As you command, Monsieur le maire."


End file.
